tions of others. You may not see just what I do in the lives of the birds or the quadrupeds, but you will see that which belongs to the same order of facts, just as you will in the world of physics. You will not see iron floating and wood sinking under like conditions, or trees growing with their roots in the air. You may see to-day something in the life of a bird, or a bee, or a beast, that neither I nor any one else ever saw before, but it will belong to the same order of things that I and others have seen these creatures do. You will not see a woodchuck hanging to a limb by his tail like a possum, nor a fox sleeping in the top of a tree like a coon, nor a loon running a race between lines of interested spectators, nor crows hoarding trinkets in a hollow stump, nor the old teaching their young this or that, and so on. No, you may send a thousand good observers to the woods every day for a thousand years, and not one of them will see any of the novel and surprising, not to say impossible, things of which the "nature fakers" see so many every time they take a walk. The nature faker's fantastic natural history is not verifiable. I have seen blackbirds build their nests in the side of an osprey's nest, and all seemed to go well-the osprey is exclusively a fish-eater — but if any person were to tell me that he had seen them build their nests alongside of that of the eagle or the hen-hawk, or that he had seen bluebirds breeding in a cavity with the hoot owl, I should know him as a faker. The rabbit is not on visiting terms with the fox or the mink, nor do the robins welcome a call from the jays. I did something the other day with a wild animal that I had never done before or seen done, though I had heard of it: I carried a live skunk by the tail, and there was "nothing doing," as the boys say. I did not have to bury my clothes. I knew from observation that the skunk could not use its battery with effect without throwing its tail over its back; therefore, for once at least, I had the courage of my convictions and verified the fact. A great many intelligent persons tolerate or encourage our fake natural history on the ground that they find it entertaining, and that it interests the school-children in the wild life about them, Is the truth, then, without value for its own sake? What would these good people think of a United States school history that took the same liberties with facts that certain of our nature writers do: that, for instance, made Washington take his army over the Delaware in balloons, or in sleighs on the solid ice with bands playing; or that made Lincoln a victim of the Evil Eye; or that portrayed his slayer as a self-sacrificing hero; or that represented the little Monitor that eventful day on Hampton Roads as diving under the Merrimac and tossing it ashore on its beak? The nature fakers take just this kind of liberties with the facts of our natural history. The young reader finds it entertaining, no doubt, but is this sufficient justification? Again, I am told that the extravagant stories of our wild life are or may be true from the writer's point of view. One of our publishing houses once took me to task for criticising the statements of one of its authors by charging that I had not considered his point of view. The fact is, I had considered it too well; his point of view was that of the man who tells what is not so. As if there could be more than one legitimate point of view in natural history observation — the point of view of fact! There is a great deal of loose thinking upon this subject in the public mind. An editorial writer in a New England newspaper, defending this school of writers, says: "Their point of view is that of the great out-ofdoors, and comes from loving sympathy with the life they study, and is as différent from that of the sportsman and the laboratory zoölogist as a notebook differs from a rifle or a microscope." Now how the point of view of the "great out-ofdoors" can differ from the point of view of the little indoors in regard to matters of fact is hard to see. A man who watches the ways of an animal in the wilderness, or from the mountain-top, is bound by the same laws of truthfulness as the man who sees |
